A group collaborating with the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning oil refineries, power plants, and other industrial facilities of a bug in a popular piece of software that could allow attackers to take control of their computer systems.

An FCC commissioner who argued for and voted to approve Comcast's $6.5bn borging of NBC Universal is quitting her government position to become a lobbyist for the communications and media giant she helped to bring into existence.

Google I/O
Google is building an interactive Native Client debugger that will integrate with various popular IDEs. According to Google engineer David Springer, the company will begin with Visual Studio before moving on to Eclipse and others.

iOS App of the Week
I suppose we could have had Qik as the Android App of the week too, since the main change that Skype has made to this video-chat app since acquiring it from the original developer earlier this year is to make it cross-platform.

Devon and Cornwall Constabulary is contesting a judgment ordering it to release the location of its fixed automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras, following a successful Freedom of Information appeal by Guardian Government Computing.

Greater internet access leads to an increase in drug abuse, according to docboffins in the US. The researchers consider that this is due to the fact that the internet offers the opportunity to illegally purchase prescription drugs from rogue online pharmacies.

NASA's Dawn has sent back its first photo of asteroid belt giant Vesta, snapped at a distance of 1.21 million kilometres (752,000 miles), and offering a teaser of what we can expect when the spacecraft goes into orbit around the distant body on 16 July.

Google is lobbying to get self-driving cars made legal, according to reports. It appears that the colossal information company is manoeuvring to get its driverless-vehicle technology cleared for ordinary consumer use in Nevada, the US state where many things which would be illegal elsewhere are OK.

Google has incurred the wrath of the French publishing industry yet again, with book publishers Albin Michel, Flammarion and Gallimard unleashing a €9.8 million law suit for unlawfully scanning 9,797 books.

Review
As a rule, I loathe retro car design. The people responsible for VW’s re-imagining of the Beetle, and BMW’s not-that-mini Mini should have passed water on the graves of Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and Sir Alec Issigonis, and had done with it. Such is the intellectual perfidy of this despicable and lazy philosophy of car design.

Famous upstart startup firm SpaceX, soon to deploy the biggest rocket seen since the days of the Apollo programme, will shortly go public. However its founder, colourful nerdwealth geek-icon biz kingpin Elon Musk, seems likely to retain a controlling interest.

Exclusive
Microsoft has quietly been rejigging its identity access group by shunting some of its key engineers out of the way in favour of fresh blood at Redmond's cryptography division, The Register has learned.

Video
If a picture tells a thousand words then data visualisation should be just the gig for the digital dirge of data clogging up your systems. It should give you an idea about what your data is telling you, and it should tell you things you didn’t even know you could know.

Desktop Virtualisation
Interest in desktop virtualisation is driven by frustration with desktop PCs and laptops. Maintenance, security, regulatory compliance – all are managed more easily with desktops that live on the server or in the data centre.

US military boffins have added cheap "fire and forget" autonomous seeker heads to basic, lightweight dumb rockets of a type which can be fired in large numbers. By seriously reducing the size and cost of smart weapons, this development is yet another big step towards changing the way wars are fought.

Publishing giant EA has continued its battle with Activision over who makes the best 'real world' first-person shooter game by releasing its next title at the same time as its arch nemesis' next offering is out.

Martin Odersky – the man who created Scala, the Java-based programming language that now drives such big name web services as Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn – has launched a company that provides service and support around an extensive open source application stack for the language.

The FBI has finally come clean on the real reason it doesn't want to name phone and internet service providers that participate in a sweeping surveillance program that taps international communications without a warrant: Customers would get mad and dump or sue the providers.

Osama bin Laden didn't have a phone or internet connection, but for years he was a prolific user of email who frustrated Western efforts to track him by saving messages to a thumb drive and having them sent from a distant internet cafe, the Associated Press reports.